Year-end guide for QuickBooks Desktop

Learn how to close out your current year and prepare for the new year in QuickBooks with your accountant.

It's never too early to get a head start on payroll. For info on how to get Payroll ready for year-end, see the QuickBooks Desktop Payroll year-end checklist.

In this article, you'll learn how to:

• Review the first month of your fiscal year
• Review customer account balances, send statements, and clear outstanding deposits
• Review supplier account balances, pay bills, or write cheques
• Reconcile all bank, credit card, and petty cash accounts
• Run year-end reports
• Invite your accountant
• Prepare your year-end tax return
• Close the books

Review the first month of your fiscal year

Select the right month to start your fiscal year so that QuickBooks can set your ledgers. You can still work on other year-end activities.

To review or change the first month of your fiscal year:

1. From Company, select My Company.
2. Select the pencil icon.
3. Go to Report Information. Check if the first month of your fiscal year is correct to make sure your financial reports use the right dates.

Review customer account balances, send statements, and clear outstanding deposits

As the year ends, make sure your client base has up-to-date balances, billings, and payments.

To settle outstanding customer payments, run an Accounts Receivable Aging Summary or Detail report:

1. From Reports, select Customers & Receivables.
2. Choose A/R Aging Summary or A/R Aging Detail.
3. Review the report to find any customers with outstanding balances.

Once you find outstanding balances, you can send statements to your customers. To send a statement:

1. From Customers, go to Create Statements.
2. Choose your A/R account.
   Note: QuickBooks displays the A/R Account field only when your chart of accounts has more than one A/R.
3. Check the statement date.
4. Select the date period of the transactions.
   Note: You can specify the dates or you can include all open (unpaid) transactions as of the statement date.
5. Choose the customers you want to print statements for.
6. Choose additional options.
7. Choose Print or E-mail, depending on how you want to send the statements to your customers.

To make reconciliation easier, make sure you don’t have any outstanding deposits.

Review supplier account balances, pay bills, or write cheques

The end of the year is the perfect time to take care of:

• Outstanding bills you owe for the year
• Outstanding credits, discounts, or products you owe from your suppliers

To review and pay outstanding bills, run an Accounts Payable Aging Summary or Details report:

1. From Reports, select Suppliers & Payables (or Supplier & Payables).
2. Choose A/P Aging Summary or A/P Aging Detail.
3. Check the report if you have outstanding bills to pay before the year ends.

Reconcile all bank, credit card, and petty cash accounts

It's a good practice to match your QuickBooks data to your bank accounts. This makes sure all transactions are correct, and your year-end reports display the correct financial info.

Before you reconcile, make sure to:

• Back up your QuickBooks company file.
• Enter all uncleared transactions for the statement period.
• Have a copy of your bank or credit card statement.

Run year-end reports

Run year-end reports to review information and identify and resolve any possible issues. To run year-end reports:

1. From Reports, select Company & Financial.
2. Select Profit and Loss and the Balance Sheet Standard, or any customized reports you may need.

It's important to understand how QuickBooks adjusts automatically at year end, for the next fiscal year.

Invite your accountant

Your accountant can provide expert advice on data input, help with your year-end process, and forecast your company’s financial future.

Work with your accountant with the Accountant's Copy. You can save the accountant's file locally, and it's safe to share electronically using the transfer service.

Prepare your year-end tax return

Taxes are usually done by a company's accountant.

Sharing the Accountant's Copy file to your accountant gives them access to all the financial info they need to prepare and file your company's taxes. They can also make any changes to it.

Close the books

QuickBooks Desktop doesn't require you to close the books as part of the year-end process. You can set a closing date password to limit access to the closed accounting period.